Reading:

Well, I'm bored out of my skull, so I've been doing some reading. Here are some mini-reviews.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: Well, what can I say? It was very readable, and I liked that Rowling managed to give her characters shades of grey. One of the problems I often have with children's books is that none of the characters are at all morally ambiguous. The hero is entirely good and the villain entirely bad. This isn't true in the Harry Potter books. Both Snape and (now) Harry's father are injected with some good qualities and some bad ones. I also thought that Rowling's inclusion of a villain who didn't fit the prototypical mold was interesting. Though I'm not sure I bought some of the character development (what the hell did Dumbledore think he was doing?), I liked the book.

Strangers and Brothers: This is the first novel in a novel-sequence by C.P. Snow. It's about a group of friends who get involved in some sketchy business dealings and are eventually tried for fraud. It also has interesting shades of moral ambiguity, because I was never sure whether or not they were innocent of the charges brought against them. The book has some problems (the narrator is a non-entity, the way I understand George is inconsistent with his later actions-- I suppose that may be my problem, not the book's), but to me the biggest problem was that it didn't inspire me to read the other six (or however many) books in the sequence. It was mildly interesting, but at times more of a chore to read than anything else.

The First Man in Rome: Subash has told me to read this at least three times, and I finally did. It's really about Marius and his ascent from provincial nobody (well, it starts after he became praetor, but before he had any hope of becoming consul) to become the first man in Rome. It wasn't particularly well-written and I had quibbles with some of the scholarship, particularly the depiction of the relationship between Sulla and Marius and the character of Livia Drusa, but it's about an interesting time and it was a pretty good read. Marius (and even Sulla) are essentially sympathetic characters, and the novel stops before the civil war when Marius' army marches on Rome. I don't see how to reconcile what Marius did in this time with his earlier actions and his portrayal in the book, and I guess the author couldn't either. Either the depiction of Marius as someone not really out for his own power at the expense of Rome is entirely false, or Marius goes senile after the events of the book and allows himelf to be convinced to march on the city. I don't know. But leaving that part out makes the book a whole lot less complicated and probably not as good.

The Wild Sheep Chase: I stopped bitching about not having read any Murakami and finally read a damn book. It was seriously weird. The plot is difficult to explain, but it involves an ad executive who goes out in search of a sheep which can enter the souls of people and control them. Or something. I don't think I quite understood what it meant to be "sheeped." I'm giving myself away for a city girl here, but I find the word sheep very funny and the concept of an omnipotent sheep even funnier. Maybe I was supposed to? Anyway, the book was beautifully written (the translation was very lyrical, though I can of course say nothing as to its accuracy), but it might have been a bit too weird for me to really like it. I couldn't really buy the premise, so the whole book read like a really complicated hypothetical from debate rather than a story. I'm glad I read it, but I can't honestly say that is was very moving. It felt like an intellectual exercise.